The Rebel Palate

(Click here to jump to the recommended song, Hot Dog by Buck Owens!) Howdy, Rebels! Welp, I can't pretend to live in "Vague New England Location" anymore. I do, in fact, live in Connecticut. You can collect your bet money now. Just saying it for those who found me through the TV Tropes "Random Media" button. And yeah. just as I thought I wouldn't have material for a while, if ever again, the inspiration came CASCADING over me like a tidal wave of creative influence. Okay, maybe this hobby isn't so creative. But still. Summit Rock Café is actually a part of Summit Studios in Manchester, Connecticut.  Summit Studios, a music school, has been around since 1995 but moved to its current Manchester location in 2000. They opened their store, Summit Music Center, in 2012. The café is a very recent addition to the business, having just opened in June 2022. In fact, when looking up the café, all I found were news headlines about its ope...

(Click here to jump to today's recommended song, Gene Vincent's cover of Unchained Melody!) It's Valentine's Day, rebels! Even though I didn't post this in December like I wanted to, Valentine's Day is an equally opportune time to talk about making cookies. Last year, I got this Mirro "Cooky" Press for my birthday, because someone needed to get rid of it and thought I'd want it. And why not? It's food-related, it's old, and it's obscure. I wasn't sure how old it was at first, so I did some minor digging. Using The Internet Archive's handy-dandy "search within text" function (which I used in this post ), I found documents containing "Mirro Cooky Press" from as far back as 1949. A book called Spiffy Kitchen Collectibles says it's from the "1940s-1950s", and since it came out in the final year of the 40s... let's just call it 50s. ...

A Decent Cup of Tea   A tea-related post from me? Way overdue. Here I review a book where some Irish guy teaches us how not to suck at brewing tea. (Click here to jump to the recommended song, A Decent Cup of Tea by Frank Turner!) Howdy, rebels! In my last post , I mentioned that tea is the "food-related item I know most about". A friend suggested that I talk about tea, but I didn't know what to say about it until now.   This is because I don't like repeating readily available information. I could drop some tea knowledge on the Rebel Palate, but I would feel dishonest knowing there are already so many better sources . This doesn't mean I can't talk about tea at all, though- I can talk about a book about tea.   I've noticed a lack of "proper" reviews for A Decent Cup of Tea by Malachi McCormick. It's popular among tea lovers, but not in the wider scope, so I thought I would post about it here. The book contains history, advice ...

Happy Labor Day, rebels. In the first part, I found out not only are Biggy Iggy and Chewy Louie still around, they’re at Richmond Market of Richmond, Vermont. (Click here to jump to the recommended song, "The Swag" by Link Wray and his Ray Men!) Happy Labor Day, rebels. In the first part, I found out not only are Biggy Iggy and Chewy Louie still around, they’re at Richmond Market of Richmond, Vermont. And that using Google instead of DuckDuckGo and just letting the store’s website load would have gotten me that information much faster. The Biggy Iggy is a whopping seven ounce, 530 calorie ice cream sandwich that brags about its “premium vanilla ice cream” between two chocolate-chip cookies that stay chewy right out of the freezer. They also get a lot of hype by the people who have had them before. According to the Flash Microsite, one convenience store cashier said “Biggy Iggies sell like flapjacks on a cold morning in Wisconsin.” The people of Massachusetts...

(Click here to jump to the recommended song, Unchained Melody as performed by Elvis Presley!) It's Elvis Week, that seven-day slice of time so named for being the anniversary week of Elvis Presley's death. Everybody knows how much the guy liked fried peanut butter-banana sandwiches, but there was another, more interesting sandwich with stranger lore behind it: The Fool's Gold Loaf. The Fool's Gold Loaf I made.   Some people call it "The Elvis Sandwich," as if it's his signature sandwich that absolutely everyone knows about INSTEAD of the peanut-butter banana... I digress. The legend goes that on February 1st, 1976, Elvis and a couple of his cop friends were reminiscing over an absolute madlad creation from Denver, Colorado. It was crafted by a bakery called the Colorado Mining Company- the Fool's Gold Loaf. An entire loaf of French bread with a jar of jelly, a jar of peanut butter and a pound of bacon inside. The outside was slathered in two tablespoo...